911: Criticism and Crisis
W.J. T. Mitchell
CriticalInquiry:a journal dedicated to the task of restoring criticism
to its rightful home: namely, a perpetual state of crisis.
-Kenneth Burke
The stately pace of the quarterly journal makes it almost impossible to
reflect on current events in a timely fashion. By the time one's words appear in print, they will already have been overtaken by events. The horizon of recent history and imminent possibility, the context of choice and
decision making will have changed in unforeseeable ways. What point, then,
could there be in producing a timely utterance that will be outdated by the
time it is heard? How can we know, as we write in this moment of "hot"
historical time, what will have been the right thing to say?
The answer, of course, is that we cannot know, and that this might
be a reasonable basis for maintaining silence. A studied and studious silence might be the best strategy in a period of compulsive, noisy talking,
a period when every commentator must have an opinion, and every opinion maker is scurrying about to find confirmation of their most cherished
convictions. Certainly, the information overload that has jammed the circuits of the global media since the terrorist attacks on Washington and
New York on 11 September 2001 makes it very difficult to get any clear,
distinct, or compelling message through. Only the simplest messages,
generally conveyed by images, have any hope of making an impact. It is
a moment when words are overwhelmed by pictures, when critical discourse and reasoned inquiry is drowned in a flood of rhetorical figures
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? 2002 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/02/2802-0007$02.00.
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911: Criticismand Crisis
T Mitchell
W.J.
and stark oppositions: Good versus Evil, God versus Satan, Us versus
Them, Civilization versus Barbarism-all the stereotypes and icons required to motivate Holy Wars, Crusades, jihads, Armaggedon, and Apocalypse. Meanwhile, the invisible figure of terror spreads like a virus
through the collective consciousness of the American people as surely as
the powdered toxin of anthrax circulates through the U.S. postal system.
The visual images circulate with equal virulence: the exploding towers
of the World Trade Center; of the Pentagon in ruins; the face of Osama
bin Laden as the mastermind of international terrorism; the sprouting
of American flags on automobiles and store windows; the desolate images
of Afghanistan, a wasteland of destruction being subjected to yet further
destruction by American bombs; the alternating file footage of bombs and
food parcels dropping out of American planes; the sea of faces-many
seas, in fact-from the photos of the victims of the World Trade Center
attack, to the crowds of angry Muslims in the streets of Pakistan, to the
endless parade of talking heads, experts, journalists, military advisors,
politicians, officials, combatants, victims, and "innocent bystanders."
The flood of images overwhelms language so completely that the
Event itself seems almost unnameable. There is a kind of awkwardness in
even giving a label or title to what happened or is happening, as signalled
for instance, by the habit of referring to the "bombing" (which it was not)
of the World Trade Center as if it condensed the entire event into a single
image, to the exclusion of the Pentagon and the hijacked plane crashing
in Pennsylvania. The television networks called it "The Attack on America," and the New YorkTimes created a new section exclusively devoted
to its coverage entitled "ANation Challenged," which sounds like euphemistic psycho-babble compared to the depth and breadth of the trauma.
Is this adequately described as a "challenge," and, if so, is it to "a" nation or to an entire world, a species?
Perhaps, as I write on 31 October 2001, it is simply too soon to give
this event a name. Perhaps it will always be too soon, and we will have to
be content with the simple mention of the date, 11 September 2001, as a
date that will be engraved on America's collective memory forever (the commemorative medallion industry is already gearing up to make a profit).
Or, perhaps even more simply, the first intuition of a symbolic, almost
was
the number of emergency-which
numerological naming-911,
among the first inchoate attempts at symbolic interpretation on the very
day of the Event. 911, however, does not name the Event. It is Day One
of an event whose days are unnumbered, indefinite, an emergency in
which the emergent order has yet to make itself clear. No end to the Event
seems visible except an interminably slow return to a "normalcy" framed
in anxiety and punctuated by more terrible events-misdirected bombs,
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W. J. T. Mitchell is the editor of CriticalInquiry.
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Winter2002
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purposeful suicide bombers, assassinations, massacres, victories, refugees-the whole hideous pageant of war and terrorism.
This is clearly not the Lovely War scenario of the Persian Gulf, a
thirty-day spectacular miniseries in prime time with (almost) total victory
and few casualties on our side. This is a war for which almost no good
outcome is imaginable: a plunge into a new form of indefinite, tentative
warfare, without a well-defined enemy or outcome. Suppose, for instance,
that by Christmas 2001, when you are reading this, the headlines read
"Taliban Defeated, Kabul Occupied by Northern Alliance"; then you will
be holding your breath to see if the "victors" commit atrocities (as they
have in the past) and whether a stable, democratically representative government can be installed, or whether the Taliban will simply retreat to
the mountains to continue a guerilla war, or slip away to bases in Iraq
and Saudi Arabia. Or suppose the headlines read "Osama bin Laden confirmed killed, assassinated, dies in bombing raid, commando assault,
commits suicide in his bunker, body not found." This, predictably, would
only be the prelude to his elevation to martyrdom and the spawning of
thousands of new martyrs to take his place. He is already now a ghostly
figure, a spectral image that cannot be killed, especially if his body is
never found. Suppose he were to televise his own death live by satellite
uplink? What words would neutralize the effect of this image on the
Arab world?
Or suppose a utopian and impossible outcome. The Christmas headlines announce that the Taliban have agreed to turn bin Laden over to a
third party, an international court that would include Islamic judges and
legal traditions and command the highest respect as a neutral arbiter. Bin
Laden and his associates are then brought before this court. A thorough
investigation and public exposure of the evidence against them is conducted, with the full intelligence resources of both the Islamic world and
the West. Instead of martyrdom, Bin Laden is given a fair trial as a criminal under both Western and Islamic codes. Instead of a lynching or assassination under the rules of "Texasjustice," an internationally legitimated
inquiry into terrorism and its causes is launched. The most glorious outcome would then be that the Islamic nations would take the lead in dealing with their fundamentalists (and perhaps the U.S. could find a way of
reigning in its own homegrown brand of fundamentalism, fascism and
racism). This process would then lead on to a further inquiry-a critical
inquiry-into the basic structural conditions that give rise to terrorism,
and a world-wide Marshall Plan is mounted to eliminate poverty, disease,
and oppression.
All this would be predicated, of course, on the United States being
willing to give up custody of bin Laden and acknowledge the authority
of an international court over him. It would mean this country would
have to behave like a citizen of this world, rather than its Last Empire. It
would have to subject itself to international law, agreeing in principle to
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911: Criticismand Crisis
having its own crimes investigated. That is why this utopian scenario is so
unlikely, alas, to come true.
So why should criticism not remain silent when all it can offer are
dystopian scenarios of endless, indecisive war or utopian visions of a
world where John Lennon's "Imagine" would be the International Anthem? Why not maintain a studied, studious, even strategic silence to
await the moment when a critical perspective becomes possible? Why not
wait for the dust to clear, the still-smoldering fires in the ruins of the World
Trade Center to die out? The answer is contained in Kenneth Burke's memorable summary of CriticalInquiry'smission as a journal "dedicated to restoring criticism to its rightful home: namely, a perpetual state of crisis."
Criticism cannot wait for the crisis to be over to have a "perspective" on
the events. Criticism is more properly understood, in fact, as a cultural
practice that is, in some deep sense, synonymous with crisis.
The critical is not just the act of judging or appraising. The critical
moment is, as the OED reminds us, "the crisis or turning-point of a disease," "of the nature of, or constituting a crisis."The critical involves "suspense or grave fear as to the issue; attended with uncertainty or risk,"
while at the same time "tending to determine or decide," as in the decisive
moment when a "critical mass" is achieved in a nuclear reactor.
Like it or not, then, CriticalInquiry will not be able to remain silent
in the midst of a crisis that challenges our very capacity for judgment,
analysis, and critique. As always, however, our voice will not be univocal,
but dialectical and dialogic, a staging of what William Blake called "Mental Warfare"-a reflection on and an antidote to the "Corporeal Warfare"
that threatens to sweep across the world. This is, as everybody seems to
agree, a war without limits, boundaries, or clear goals. It is not adequately
described as a war against terrorism since every side regards its antagonists as the true terrorists and its own warriors as martyrs and heros. And
at this point the number of sides has not even become clear, as the U.S.
attempts to hold together a shifting, unstable alliance of momentary convenience to support a war whose aims (revenge? the imposition of Texas
justice? the killing of one man? the rooting out of a terrorist organization
that circulates like a virus throughout the entire world system? the building of a stable nation-state in Afghanistan?) are likely to become less clear
as time goes on.
This is not, then, a "call for papers" on the current crisis. We have
had an overabundance of papers that claim to have a "critical perspective" on these events, a superfluity of Cassandra-like prophecies in reverse. There is nothing quite so irritating at a moment like this as the
pose of critical certainty, of smug assurance that one could see this coming
a long way off, that one knows exactly why it happened (whether it is
regarded as the judgment of God, as Jerry Falwell put it, or the judgment
of history, as so many pundits have claimed, or simply the eruption of
radical evil and madness). Nor does this seem like an interesting moment
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Winter2002
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to debate whether this crisis means the end of postmodernism or its final
realization. The critical voices that seem to matter most at this moment
are those that seem prepared to acknowledge that this event might exceed our categories of critical judgment and require some new ways of
thinking. If the Pentagon is sending its planners to consult with Hollywood screenwriters about possible terrorist scenarios, why shouldn't criticism be prepared to think outside the box as well? Perhaps we might even
consider revisiting some old ways of thinking (about, for instance, a world
order dedicated to international peace and justice, with an end to fascism, racism, sexism, political oppression, and crushing economic inequality) that have been widely discredited in the face of a patriotic
consensus that this is not the time for debate, not the time for critical
disagreement, and certainly not the time for questioning the American
possession of the moral high ground.
But of course it is, and must always be, the right moment for raising
this question if the very idea of America is to have any meaning. Americans are now being asked not to be critical, not to question the judgment
of our leadership. Journalists are being prevented from covering the war;
filmmakers are being urged to produce patriotic propaganda; college
professors are being criticized for being skeptical about our war in Afghanistan. All these tendencies must be resisted in the name of a deeper
patriotism than that signalled by flag-waving.
It is the right moment, then, for untimely utterances and awkward
silences, a time for examining what cannot or should not be said and for
reflecting on the conditions of sayability and the unspeakable. Consider
the things that have been said in the last two months that were instantly
villified as beyond the pale of acceptable discourse:
-that whatever else you might say about them, the suicide bombers
who flew commercial airliners into the World Trade Towers and the
Pentagon were not "cowardly."
-that the event of 11 September was "Lucifer'sgreatest work of art."
-that this was God's judgment on America's turn toward secular
values.
-that this was God's judgment on the Christian and Jewish infidels
who have desecrated the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, killed thousands
of Iraqis, and supported the repressive policies of Israel toward the
Palestinians.
-that this was payback time for a half-century of American world
dominance and specifically its misguided policies in the Middle East,
its backing of repressive, reactionary Arab regimes as part of policy
of cold war containment and greed for cheap oil.
-that this is a war we could lose, perhaps are losing already, and will
certainly lose if we sacrifice civil liberties, the rule of law, and political
or critical deliberation to a never-ending "state of emergency."
-that this is the systemic result of global capitalism, and could well
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911: Criticismand Crisis
be the oft-predicted "end of history,"the true face of the New World
Order, the Mother of All Battles, Armageddon, Holy War, and the
beginning of the collapse of human civilization.
-that there are no "innocent victims" on either side in a terrorist
war, that the lives of the people being killed in Afghanistan right now
are just as sacred as the lives of those killed on 11 September, and
that wrapping oneself in the mantle of their innocence is just as misguided as consigning one's antagonists to the role of "Evil Doers."
None of these things can be said right now, but all of them are being
said anyway and will continue to be said in the coming months. Official,
approved, and politically correct discourse will continue to be filled with
paradox. The war will be "right on schedule," but will stretch indefinitely
into the future. A victory will be declared if bin Laden is killed or captured, but the state of emergency will continue as long as one terrorist
remains. Periodic warnings of unspecified impending attacks will alternate with urgings to behave as if everything is all right. The American
people will return to "normalcy,"but things will never be the same. Dissent from U.S. policy and disagreement with partisan political objectives
will be denounced as unpatriotic divisiveness that threatens our basic
freedoms. Any day now someone will tell a war protester, "We are fighting
for your right to free speech, so shut up!"
John Coetzee has argued that the true vocation of criticism is to "interrogate" and "decenter" the classic, the touchstone of ultimate achievement in the arts, the masterwork of the human imagination. If criticism
is faithful to this task, suggests Coetzee, it has a chance to be "one of the
instruments of the cunning of history." But we also know, as Stockhausen
reminds us, that there is an art of evil as well and that it comes out of the
human soul. Oscar Wilde's small masterpiece, The Picture of Dorian Gray,
reminds of the equivocal moral status of the work of art. Dorian Gray
comes to see "evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his
conception of the beautiful." Criticism cannot confine itself only to the
contemplation of the benign, life-affirming classics, but must reckon as
well with the weave of good and evil, pity and terror in the dark passages
of tragic art and tragic events. In the midst of all this confusion, in the
midst of all the urgings to say the right thing or to say nothing at all, it is
the patriotic duty of every American citizen to continue to do his or her
job. Our job is critical inquiry.